Pronounce Kamala

[HelenWheels]

apparently it is like Comma, as in a sentence and La

however we pronounce comma differently in UK
i guess it should be pronounced as they do in America rather than we would in UK?

I cannot even hear the RRRRRRRRRRRRRRR that so many insist is in a certain type of British (or is it only English?) accent, or that anyone ever said PARRRRRsta for pasta or BARRRRRth for bath, etc.

Weird. I utterly have never heard the RRRRRRRRR sound at all.

I'm going to drop a big clanger here... Harris is pretty much same age as me & grew up not far from where I grew up ... she like me probably doesn't care hugely about our names being incorrectly pronounced. We don't care partic about accents. We'll only bother to correct you if it's important to get it right (very often isn't remotely important). I imagine Harris cares (somewhat) if she's being mocked, but innocent mistakes are shrugged at.

It is very British ime to care so deeply about perfect pronunciations or accents. I Cannot tell you how many times people wanted to tell me at length how Canadian I sounded... and how little I cared if I sounded Canadian or not and puzzled why it was so important to them. Or people wanted to apologise profusely for saying wrong or mispelling my name (as if I could have cared less).

This thread is worrisome. Why would anyone think that the way VP Harris says her name is incorrect? Kamala is what her mama (momma) named her; the way she says it is correct because it is HER name!

The way that any other person with the same name/spelling pronounces it is not pertinent, because, again, THEIR name is their own.

This is not about "whitesplaining" or how other cultures say it, or even other individuals. It's a matter of RESPECT.

Your name is a large part of your identity. Even if it doesn't follow the rules, or match anyone else's, the way YOU say it or spell it IS correct BECAUSE it is YOURS.

No one else has the right to tell you how to spell or pronounce it. It's demeaning to you and whoever named you, and it's incredibly entitled and disrespectful of anyone who tells you differently.

Just out of interest...how do people feel about how their name (if they are British) is pronounced by Americans, when the English and American English pronunciation differs?

So Naddalee for Natalie or Nuh-TAHH-shuh for Natasha, Serra for Sarah etc?

Or, say Scottish or Irish people who would pronounce Clare, or Eleanor very differently to an RP speaker from Surrey?

Or how a French person would say naturally Charlotte or Emily or Alice or Zoe in their own accent...should they emulate the British pronunciation for British Charlottes, Alices, Emilys, Zoes?

Do we think that everyone else in the world should all reproduce the exact way we personally say our own name? Even if it means unlearning an accent and learning entirely new vowel sounds? Do we hold it against them or accept the natural accent difference?

I ask because I'm British Asian, my immigrant parents pronounce my name very differently from each other and me myself as we all have different first languages and accents. My grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins etc on both sides also pronounce it differently again. And Americans, French, Spanish, Polish, Italian people all pronounce my name differently to me...because we all have different accents. It genuinely doesn't upset or offend me at all and would never have occurred to me to be offended. I just accept it's an accent difference. It's not that deep. I'd only get pissed off if they shortened or Anglicised my name.

Are we all tying ourselves in knots here un-necessarily? Bearing in mind, I am making an effort to say it as Kamala Harris herself does and can easily reproduce it so no skin in the game.

I'm just very aware, there is no way my Scottish MIL will manage to pronounce it the same as KH no matter how hard she tries and it's really not her fault. Pronouncing it similarly to the beginning of Cameron or Camera is as good as it gets for her (rhyming with Pamela), Come-ala or Comma-la sound nothing like what Kamala herself says in MIL's accent. MIL says comma like coma. Oddly, when I say it out loud, Come-UH-luh is exactly how she says the Queen, Camilla's, name. I've mentioned on MN before, I (RP) say Car Key and Khaki the exact same way but MIL says Cacky for Khaki and Carrrrr Key for Car Key - both versions absolutely right in our own accents. It's really easy for me to get KH's name right because my accent is very neutral, but it would be wrong for me to assume it's that easy for everyone. I'd say, with my own name, I'm pretty tolerant/forgiving that the middle consonant and knowing where to put the stress are particularly tricky and there are also at least three ways to spell it.

Brits don't tie ourselves in knots over whether it's Ivanka or Ivonka Trump - do we? But it is pronounced more like Ivonka in the US... Same with Me -lan- ya, Mel-ah-nia or Mel-onia. We just use our own accents for those names generally.

I think we've got to try our best to get as close as we can but sometimes accents genuinely can't be helped and it's not that people are being awkward or pretending they don't get it. Do you think it upsets Kamala Harris when people don't get it perfectly right? Maybe saying Kam as in Kamran or Kamal rather than Com as in Comma? Or Kumuhluh in the way that millions of Indians might pronounce Kamala? Genuine question.

This clip has the US pronunciation of bath with a short ‘a’ and the RP British pronunciation with the long (ah/ar) ‘a’ sound. https://dictionary.cambridge.org/pronunciation/english/bath

Thats literally the point they are making.

You don't have to put on an American accent to pronounce it close to the way she does. Quite a few British commentators seem to manage it.

@beenwhereyouare

The confusion with this explanation is that in the US, Pamela is pronounced differently. Pam, ham, Cam, ram, dam (all these have the same initial vowel sound in US speak.) It may not help you, as some of these have a different sound in the UK, but it's indicative of American English

All these words have the same initial sound in a Scottish English too.

And all sound similar to Pamela and Kamala.

Nobe if them have extra 'r's in them either.

It would be helpful if people stopped insisting things are UK or British when I fact they mean English.

Sorry for the typos

This video has everything you need to know to pronounce her name. Dr. Geoff nails it.

It's hard if you have a non-rhotic accent, as the majority of UK English speakers do, because if you don't have a background in phonetics, your automatic way of trying to describe the long 'ah' sound is to use 'ar' - because car/cah, bar/baa, ma/marr all sound exactly the same to you (as they do to me). There aren't many words, if any, that are actually spelt with an 'ah' to represent the long 'ah' sound in English, so naturally we non-rhotic speakers default to a homophone.

These threads always demonstrate how little any of us actually listen to the sounds of other accents, even though we hear them all the time. For example, we hear loads of American voices all the time on screen, so we have heard numerouse times that 'mom' is pronunced something like 'mahm' and that God is pronounced something like 'Gahd' (to a SE English speaker) numerous times (actually not a long 'ah', but somewhere between that and our short 'u', before loads of Americans tell me that's wrong) but we don't really notice it. Mom pronounced the US way sounds much closer to my SE English pronunciation of Mum than I thought when I saw it written down as a child.

If you have a non-rhotic accent and don't pronounce the letter r at the end of words then what other people hear when you say car, bar, far is more like cah, bah, fah. With a longer vowel sound, as in father. Not the vowel in cat, bat, fat. They wouldn't represent your speech phonetically as having the r on the end, because you aren't making that sound.

(If those vowels sound the same for you, your accent doesn't have this split! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap%E2%80%93bath_split the audio file there will help)

If you struggle to imagine a rhotic accent, imagine 'talk like a pirate' - arr! carr, barr, farr. That's rhotic. (Exaggerated, obviously.) So when your phonetic rendition of a word includes a 'silent r' to lengthen the vowel, rhotic speakers are imagining an actually pronounced r which makes no sense and shouldn't be there. CARR-mal-la.

Neither of these accents is wrong. People are just talking past each other on how to represent what they're saying.

English speakers say Kar-mar-la.

Indians would say Kam-la.

Ask a Russian about Natasha
A Jewish person about Natalie

Ask a Russian about Natasha
A Jewish person about Natalie

I would say it KuhMARla but I know that's wrong.

yes it’s definitely not about right or wrong but ah/ar does have an ‘r’ sound to me. It’s just different to a rolled/pirate r sound. That’s how I - and lots of other people describe the sound which is represented variously by the spellings ‘ar’ in bar & car, ‘a’ in ‘bra’ & ‘tra-la-la, ‘ah’ as in blah blah, and ‘al’ as in calm, ‘are’ as in the word are, ‘ear’ as in heart, ‘er’ as in clerk, and ‘au’ as in laugh. In fact they have a stronger r sound than ‘spectacular’ which rhymes with Dracula. Isn’t English bizarre (arre) and marvellous! (ar)!

@AncientAndModern1

You’ve missed that posters point.

You are describing bra as having the same sound as car. They only have the same sound because you have a non-rhotic accent and don’t pronounce the r. In a rhotic accent those words don’t rhyme at all. The only reason that you think they have an “r” sound is because in your accent karm and calm are homophones. In many accents they are not.

Think of a Belfast accent. Car doesn’t rhyme with bra in that accent. They also don’t rhyme in in North American, Scottish or West Country accents, for example. If spar and spa sound the same to you then you are not pronouncing the r. What you are describing as an r is actually a change in the vowel, not an r.

I get asking a Russian about Natasha (as it's Russian in origin) but why a Jew about Natalie (which is French)?

And that's not my point anyway.
Russian Natasha and English Natasha will pronounce their own names differently from each other. And that's ok.

This is an excellent point. Trump and his supporters are deliberately saying her name wrong, trying to other her and plant doubts about where she came from, remember Trump was big in the birther movement back in 2008 and tried to keep it going for years. So while innocent mispronunciations are not a problem it is important to try and educate yourself and learn to say her name how she says it, because it’s HER name.

Interestingly back when he was Secretary of State in the Bush administration we all managed to say CO-lin Powell and not typical pronunciation of Colin just fine.

I think that often an approximation is okay. There are often going to be differences. For example, I have a rhotic accent so I do not pronounce the name of King Charles the way he does.

In the case of the Vice President of the United States, the main thing is to put the emphasis on the first syllable. Her detractors, many of them outright racists, like to pronounce the name with the emphasis on the second syllable as an act of disrespect. Variations in the 'a' sound of that first syllable are to be expected in different accents. Just be sure to keep the stress on that first syllable, and I think you'll be fine.

To me, as someone who regularly has to deal with the pronunciation difference, there is a difference between some of these issues that arise because of dialect and what happens with Kamala's name. Many times it's the stress pattern (putting the stress on the second syllable and not the first) that people get wrong, not a naturally occurring vowel difference. That's not down to accent/dialect.

and yes, for Harris, the issue is that people deliberately mispronounce her name as a way to disrespect her.

It is AN r sound. There is more than one r sound in English. In fact there are many. https://support.logicofenglish.com/hc/en-us/articles/4706709934875-Sounds-of-R-and-ER#:~:text=The%20vocalic%20%2Fr%2F%20sounds%20may,as%20in%20car%20and%20heart

Horrible Harris sounds like an anti-hero in a series of children's books.

Killer Kamala and you mean!??

It's an Indian name, meaning 'lotus'. It is usually pronounced 'Kummula'